Letters to the Editor for April 25, 2014

Published April 23, 2014 at 1:31 pm

Can’t extol virtues of Catholic church

To the Editor:

Sorry, I can’t muster up the kind of adulation Marge Miller suggests for the Catholic church. It’s a fallacy to conclude that if they hadn’t started schools or hospitals no one else would have. They saw an opportunity and took advantage of it mostly for a chance to proselytize. To say nothing of the inherent contradiction in religion attempting to operate as an educational institution. Religion and faith are based on following dogma without question, while true education requires willingness to change as new information replaces old. We’re not the center of the universe as once was believed. The earth is more than 6,000 years old.

The Catholic church’s centuries of repression of women, their endless accumulation of wealth while claiming to be helping the poor, the recent exposure of sexual exploitation of children as a result of imposed priestly abstinence, all easily cancel any supposed good they may want to take credit for.

In their hospitals they impose restrictions or limits on procedures such as birth control and abortion on patients of different or no religions and try to exclude these from the health insurance for their employees.

Rather than extolling their efforts in these areas, we should be angry at how they have infiltrated our secular culture and imposed so much of their beliefs on our society. They, as well as many other religions, are constantly at work undermining our constitutional separation of church and state.

Owen Strand
Anoka

U.S. is not a Christian nation

To the Editor:

We need to stop calling this a Christian nation because we do not take care of our poor, our hungry, and our disabled.

Republicans, stop calling this a Christian nation, because the only people we take care of are the rich and able.

This is not a Christian nation, because we do not follow Jesus in his preachings, we do not treat all equal, we do not feed our hungry and poor and we do not help our disabled.

We are not a Christian nation until we treat all equal. When women were given the right to vote there was a constant to repeal it, when Civil Rights was put in place there was a constant to repeal it, I cannot understand how our elected do not learn from their past to improve their future.

The fact that the USA had intern camps for Japanese and Germans during wars and yet know one remembers this that is elected. Maybe it is because we no longer teach this to our children.

This is not a Christian nation, state, county, or city(s) because we do not care for our poor, hungry and disabled. We only care for our rich and able.

Laurie Olmon
Nowthen

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